Women still find it hard to gain respect and security at home, leave alone outside. Work places have issues like repressions and sexual harassments imbedded in the work culture, when it comes to female employees. Public transport still gives the entire female population using it, a time of hell. Whether it be staring through front mirrors by ‘autowallas’, or incidents of groping and inappropriate touching in public buses, most of us have gone through it all or we all know about many such incidents from people who went through this. 

Crimes against women be it female infanticide, child marriage, pedophilia, sexual harassment (no matter at what age you are), dowry deaths, physical abuse, etc follow them as a constant scare from cradle (or before a female foetus is formed) to grave. 

We might just believe that this is not a part of our society or that we have been able to reduce it, but it sounds like the case of scared ostrich that buries it face in the sand, not seeing its predators and in the make belief that that it’s not there.

Are we living in a society of ostriches (no embarrassment to accept given the fact that ‘man is a social animal’) where we turn our faces away from the evils and believe that those evils don’t exist amongst us. 

But why blame ‘men’ aren’t we women also mostly afraid to oppose or ‘speak-up’ as we live in the fear that what might turn out to be that point of ‘slightest provocation’.

Yes I know feminists would come after me with their metaphorical draggers for saying this, but this too is true; maybe 100 or 1000 wont believe in this statement but these won’t be the true representations of the masses (fairer sex). 

Women are so often, literally and metaphorically, stripped off their dignity that they most often just refuse to standup on their own for themselves. When I say literally stripped I mean it in a physical sense. Take the recent incidents of terror against Christian women (especially nuns) in Orrisa and Karnataka; or the pervious incidents of violence against women in Northeast (many of which were acts of rape and harassment committed by Army officers), and well why go far take the case of a false sting operation against Uma Khurana in Delhi where after the sting was telecast on a national news channel a mob stripped the innocent school teacher. Women are being forced to run with shattered and tattered pieces of clothes (read dignity) on streets, as people watch as mute and disabled spectators. 

I do not wish to demean or demoralise the spirit of my sex but this is the grave picture which both the sexes should look into. Men are reluctant even if we ask them to get up from a ‘ladies’ seat in a public transport. We have to cover a huge distance, as a vast road stretches ahead of us, before we get a dignified space to stand individually in a crowded place – a bus or train!